Handmade Electronic Music

Nicolas Collins, an active composer and performer, has worked with John Cage, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor, and many other masters of modern music. Dr. Collins is a professor in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. He has led hacking workshops around the world. He has been Visiting Artistic Director of STEIM (Amsterdam), a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin, and a long-time Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Music Journal.

Foreword to First Edition (David Behrman)

Introduction

PART I: STARTING

1. Getting Started: Tools and Material Needed

2. The Seven Basic Rules of Hacking: General Advice

PART II: LISTENING

3. The Victorian Synthesizer: Twitching Loudspeakers

4. In/Out: Speaker as Microphone, Microphone as Speaker, the Symmetry of it All

5. How to Solder: an Essential Skill

6. Circuit Sniffing: Eavesdropping on Hidden Magnetic Music

7. How to Make a Contact Mike: Using Piezo Disks to Pick up Tiny Sounds

8. Turn Your Wall into a Speaker: Resonating Objects with Transducers, Motors and More

9. Paper Speakers (Jess Rowland)

10. Tape Heads: Play Your Credit

11. Electret Microphones: Binaural on a Budget

12. Laying of Hands: transforming a Radio into a Synthesizer by Making Your Skin Part of the Circuit

PART III: BUILDING

13. My First Oscillator™: Six Oscillators on a Chip, Guaranteed to Work

14. Solder Up! From Breadboard to Circuit Board

15. Getting Messy: Modulation, Feedback, Instability and Crickets

16. Soft Circuitry: An Introduction to E-Textile Interfaces (Lara and Sarah Grant)

17. On/Off (More Fun With Photo Resistors): Gating, Tremolo, Panning and More

18. Mixers and Matrices: Very Simple, Very Cheap, Very Clean Ways of Configuring Lots of Circuits

19. Boost and Distort: A Simple Circuit that Goes from Clean Preamp to Total Distortion

20. Analog to Digital Conversion, Sort of: Modulating Other Audio with Your Circuits, Pitch Tracking, and a Sequencer

21. Beyond Bending: Triggering, Sequencing and Modulating Circuit Bent Toys (Alex Inglizian)

22. Video Hacking (LoVid (Tali Hinkis, Kyle Lapidus) and Jon Satrom)

23. An Introduction to Op Amps

24. A Little Hacker’s Amp

25. The Mumma-Tudor Ring Modulator (Michael Johnsen and You Nakai)

26. Paper Circuits (Peter Blasser)

27. Rule the Airwaves: Build a Radio Transmitter (Brett Balogh)

28. A Grab Bag of Samples: A Voltage Controlled Radio Receiver (Holger Heckeroth)

29. A Lo-Fi Sampler and Looper (Holger Heckeroth)

30. The Bissell Function Block: A Lag Processor (Peter Speer)

31. Sounds from Neural Networks (Wolfgang Spahn)

PART IV: COMPUTING

32. Sharing Traces: Designing and Fabricating Your Own Printed Circuit Boards with Fritzing (Eduardo Rosario)

33. Microcontroller Sound (Joseph Kramer)

34. Small Sound: Pure Data on the Raspberry Pi (Robb Drinkwater)

35. Data Hacking: The Foundations of Glitch Art (Nick Briz)

PART V: CONNECTING

36. Handmade Sound Communities (Lisa Kori and David Novak)

37. Hello World!

COMPANION WEBSITE CONTENTS

1. Project Support

Sharing Traces -- Designing and Fabricating Your Own Printed Circuit Boards (Eduardo Rosario)

Microcontroller Sound (Joseph Kramer): Data files and additional projects for chapter 33

Paper Circuits (Peter Blasser): Circuit board artwork for Rungling circuit in chapter 26

Sounds from Neural Networks (Wolfgang Spahn): Circuit board artwork for Confetti Neuron circuit in chapter 31

2. Technical Bootcamp

Ohm’s Law for Dummies: How to Understand Resistors

Switches: How to Understand Different Switches, and Make Your Own

Jack, Batt and Pack: Powering and Packaging Your Circuits

Power Supplies: Carbon Footprints from AA to EEE

3. Circuit Bending

Tickle the Clock: Finding the Clock Circuit in Toys

Hack the Clock: Changing the Clock Speed for Cool New Noises

Video Music/Music Video: Translating Video Signals into Sound, Hacking Cameras, and Extracting Sounds from Remote Controls

Beyond the Pot: Photoresistors, Pressure Pads and Other Ways to Play Your Toy

LCD Art: Making Animated Modern Daguerreotypes and Alternate Video Projectors

4. Culture and History

Do It With Others: Hardware Hacking in South America (Florencia Curci, Alma Laprida and Sebastián Rey)

Hacer con Otrxs: Hardware Hacking en Sudamérica (Florencia Curci, Alma Laprida and Sebastián Rey) (Original Spanish version of Do It With Others)

Bleep Listening (Ezra Teboul)

A History of Japanese Hacking and DIY Music (ADACHI Tomomi)

日本のハッキング・DIY音楽史 （足立智美）(Original Japanese version of A History of Japanese Hacking and DIY Music) (ADACHI Tomomi)

Livening Things Up: Australian Hand-Built Electronic Instruments (Caleb Kelly and Pia van Gelder)

Gambioluthiery: Hacking and DIY in Brazil (Giuliano Obici)

A Brief Personal History of dorkbot-nyc (Douglas Repetto)

The Contact Microphone: A Cultural Object (Daniela Fantechi)

David Tudor (You Nakai and Michael Johnsen)

Pixel Artists (LoVid and Jon Satrom)

Circuit Board as Design (Eduardo Rosario)

Circuit Bending (Nicolas Collins)

Visual Music (Nicolas Collins)

The Future Was Then (Nicolas Collins)

5. Tutorials

6. Gallery of Artist's Work